On 21 January 2015 at 20:47, David Boxall <[email protected]> wrote:
I hate to break it to you, but the human race will end. > I have no doubt about that. Just to clarify, I fully support active CO2 reduction policy of a more serious kind than anything on offer yet. And I'm personally 100% willing to take an the economic hit. The impacts of continuing along the current path are clearly disastrous. I just can't see it wiping out the human race. Some people will left in concrete boxes wondering why we let it happen. That is my don't-go-there situation. Watching the global warming debate has really affirmed my belief in human stupidity. Quite apart from aesthetic issues, collective climate change mitigation is a no-brainer on purely economic grounds unless you expect to be dead within 20 years and don't care much about anyone else. The unfortunate evidence is that's how an awful lot of us appears to think: basically, to follow our biological programming to exploit the available environment. On the positive side, the libertarian movement seems to be on the wane, the Chinese are on board, solar power is becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, energy storage is following, and geoengineering looks to offer a last-resort option for abatement. (Interestingly, the warming pause/slowdown of the last decade or so now looks to be mainly attributable to increased volcanic activity. And just to get in first I'm not advocating geoengineering, it will produce another set of problems. Realistically though, it might be part of the kludge.) Jore: I'm sort of in agreement but I see it a little differently. Biology is all about exploitation. We might have a Garden-of-Eden nature aesthetic (which actually indicates our disconnect from nature) but look under any rock or in any ecosystem and you see warfare, uneasy truces and exploitation. Species that didn't maximally exploit their environment are no longer with us. This is built into the DNA of us and everything else. We didn't develop big brains or cooperation or anything else to be nice or something we developed them to be even more successfully exploitative. This has (arguably) worked well for a few billion years but we are suddenly up against ourselves. It isn't culture that made us exploitative, it is culture that can stop us, or at least to mitigate our most shortsighted programmed exploitative tendencies. Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
